Sony has been concerned with piracy for a long time and with understandable cause. They lost countless amounts of sales of PSP games due to hacked consoles and the downtime caused by the security breach of the PSN last year is well documented. It seems they are determined to prevent the same thing happening on PlayStation Vita, which seems to be the reason for proprietary game cards and memory sticks used on the device.

It also seems that the reason not all PSP games are currently playable on the Vita is due to hackers exposing gaps in the software of some PSP titles to gain access to the Vita firmware, something that is preventing Motorstorm: Arctic Edge hitting the Vita.

Now it also seems that another title is vulnerable to this kind of attack, with Super Collapse 3 now being removed from the PSN store. It seems that these removed titles can allow the running of a piece of software called the ‘Vita Half-Byte Loader’ (VHBL) which then allows users to run homebrew software through the PSP emulator and onto Vita.

The creator of the VHBL however has stated that his software does not allow for piracy because it only allows access to the ‘user mode’ of the firmware, and therefore wont allow for the launching of games. It seems that Sony isn’t taking any chances however given their past experiences. At least until these holes can be fixed, we now have three titles unavailable on the store.